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Saturday, January 12, 2013

Gong Show: Wasabi Dream

I love it when a band's start isn't actually it's genuine start, but even though it's still kind of a start it's now prefaced with an enticingly ominous assessment:

"I feel as though it could go really well or fall flat on its face..."

Wasabi Dream (Adam Cox on the moog/vibraphones/string-synth and lead vocals, Noah Eikhoff on bass and vocals and David Vaughan, who's quoted above, playing drums and an imposing gong) started two years ago, even though their "debut" is January 26th at the Lager House.

They started out with a rule:

not to let things ever get too serious.

"Mainly we just wanted to start a band where we could play and write music in ways not possible with what our other projects were, at that time," Vaughan said. "Noah was playing a lot with Druid Perfume and Adam was with The Octopus and Conspiracy of Owls and I was touring with Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and a songwriter from Nashville. We wanted to start a side-project together with strange instrumentation... " (gong...) "...centered mainly around the vibraphone."

One track from their demos, (recorded entirely by themselves as a collaborative recording project inside Cox's Brooksfield Gentlemen's Club studio at the former/closed-down charter school Malcom X Academy) is tellingly titled "There will be drums..." in which Cox and Vaughan seem to race each other in a thunderous march.

"Now, since we've each disbanded from everything else but Wasabi Dream, its been the past six months where we've all really started working on this project and it's been an absolute pleasure."

Main influences, Vaughan notes: "Tortoise/King Crimson/Miles Davis... Indeed, there were constant references to the In a Silent Way sessions by Miles during the recording process."

Other reference points? Well, take the avant garde jazz flares of post-rock types like Tortosie and add in the inevitable lounge-pop groove aesthetic invited by vibraphones, the brighter hues brought in by the melodious string-synths and the playful spaceship cascades of those moogs and you might suggest a bit of experimental rhythm-centric, ambient-noise and atmospheric-rock auteurs like maybe some Cornelius or Stereolab...but there's murkier, mesmerizing movements or meanderings where where things get pretty tripped out, foggy and wonderfully weird...could be Can or Neu or even Mogwai...